What is the folk concept of remembering?

What is involved in understanding the concept of remembering? According to the CausalTheory, the most popular analysis of remembering in philosophy, someone can be said toremember if and only if (1) the remembered event occurred (Factivity), (2) one has hadpersonal experience of the event (Prior Experience), and (3) there exists an appropriate causalconnection between one’s current memory and one’s prior experience of the event(Causality). We tested whether this way of understanding remembering is shared by nativeEnglish speakers more widely (Experiment 1) and by native speakers of nine other languagesaround the world (Experiment 2). We asked participants to judge (a) what beliefs are entailedby someone’s subjective judgment of remembering, and (b) what conditions have to hold forsomeone to “actually” remember. Our results suggest that the folk concept of rememberingacross our samples largely falls in line with the analysis provided by the Causal Theory,while also showing significant cross-linguistic variation. These results have implications forhow we should think about the scientific and philosophical objects of memory research aswell as for the question of whether “remembering” and its translations express a culturallyuniversal concept.